Kathy Anderson / The Times-PicayuneCarl Gustafson is a commercial photographer, shrimper and "jack of all trades" who spends his time working on his Chalmette home.

When's the last time you met somebody from Chalmette who warned you not to confuse him with the king of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf?

Well, they both wear glasses, and they both have gray hair. But that's about it -- except for this: The local guy's name is Carl Gustafson (Gus-TAF-son) and he is of Swedish (and French) descent.

Gustafson, 67, is a Hurricane Katrina survivor whose sense of humor has gotten him through three years of living in various states of limbo and disarray, including sleeping in a garage and cooking in a greenhouse.

"I'm on high ground here now. Only got 7½ feet of water here," he said of his post-storm home near Nunez Community College. "My place in Buccaneer Village got 13½ feet."

A swimming pool in the backyard of Gustafson's current home is loaded with fish. It was like that when he bought the house.

"There were fish in the kitchen," he said, so the fish in the pool were no surprise.

Gustafson is a marine and military commercial photographer whose credits include covers of Aviation Week, Maritime Reporter, and other marine and military industry publications. He did photography for Textron Marine for decades. (His dad worked in the stereotype department at the old New Orleans Item, The States-Item, The Times-Picayune and the Chicago Tribune.)

Katrina left her mark on all of Gustafson's pictures and negatives, most of which were from the pre-digital era. Old fishing pictures, years of photos of Mardi Gras in the French Quarter, classic freeze pictures from ice-covered old West End restaurants, countless photos of vessels and boats being tested -- they all now have a surreal watery kaleidoscope look to them, stuck in albums, only parts of the original photos still visible.

Kathy Anderson / The Times-PicayuneGustafson, 67, loves to fish. He most recently took his companion, Elena, a women he met on the Internet with him fishing. He said, "We went fishing. It cost me $90 for her fishing license -- talk about an out-of-state license. And mine cost $5."

"That's the worst part, losing the negatives and pictures," he said, opening a container of ruined memories, the first trace of sadness coming into his voice. "You couldn't duplicate this ever again." Then he paused a moment. "You do realize only six houses out of 30,000 were dry down here?" he asked, as if to explain what happened to his collection.

But it's not his style to dwell on the bad stuff. He'd rather show off his home renovations, most of which he is doing himself.

"I'm a jack of all trades, you could say. I got a shrimp boat, too. Matter of fact, a guy told me, 'You built a shrimp boat, you ought to be able to build a house,'¤" Gustafson said.

He is putting in walls made of tongue-in-groove wood -- cypress, poplar and pine -- he got from Ovett, Miss., and he is proud of that.

"The whole house is going to be wood," he said.

The tour slows for a moment in one room, where a dark-haired woman suddenly appears.

"That's Elena, my companion," he said, introducing her. "She's from the Philippines, 8,000 miles away. You've got to go a long way to get somebody to come to Chalmette."

They met on the Internet. She travels here on six-month visas and has made three trips.

Once when she went back to the Philippines between visits, there were two typhoons there.

"I told her you better come back to Chalmette where it's safe," Gustafson said.

When he was younger, Gustafson was part of the local music scene and worked for two record distributorships, A-1 and All-South, back when there were labels such as Minit and Instant. He remembers Allen Toussaint recording at Cosimo Matassa's studio in the French Quarter.

His record collection, which dates back to the 1950s and ¤'60s, includes early 45s from Fats Domino, Johnny Adams, Eddie Bo, a Dr. John instrumental named "Storm Warning" and countless others.

"I was living near Casino Magic before Casino Magic (now Hollywood Casino) came along. I saved'em all, cleaned'em with Whistle (a cleaner) and they were fine," he said of the records.

Then he moved to Chalmette.

Thirty-six years later, Katrina got them. But this go-round, Gustafson said he doesn't have the time or the desire to go through the painstaking cleaning process. So he is planning to donate them all to WWOZ. "There's some promotional DJ copies in there, real old labels, pretty good stuff," he said.

But photography, which he took up while he was a student at Bay High School in Bay St. Louis, Miss., became his career for the past 40-plus years. And he has cherished every minute of it.